> I mean for one, because of people like you that are concerned about it. Apple wants you to have the choice if you are against this feature. It's silly to try to use that as some sort of proof that the feature isn't safe.

If they know some people will be against the feature, why not ask instead of enabling it for them?

> My iPhone has a button to disable the flash in the camera app. Does that imply that somehow using the camera flash is dangerous and Apple is trying to hide the truth from us all? Obviously not, it simply means that sometimes you may not want to use the flash.

Do you really not see how this is not a good faith comparison? I'm not going to address this.

> They likely chose to make it opt-out because their research shows that this is truly completely private, including being secure against future post-quantum attacks.

So basically your version of this story is:

- Apple knows some users will not like/trust this feature, so they include an option to turn it off.

- But they don't bother to ask if it should be turned on, because they are sure they know better than you anyway.

I agree. And it's this attitude that needs to die in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

> Also, if you're going to wildly speculate like this it is at least (IMO) worth reading the research press release since it does answer many of the questions you've posed here[0].

I don't need to, what I said generalizes to all cryptosystems trivially. The only encryption technique that provably can never be cracked is one-time pad, with a key of truly random data, of size equal to or greater than the data being encrypted. No other cryptosystem in any other set of conditions has ever been proven impossible to crack.

Homomorphic encryption is very cool, but you can't just overwhelm the user with cryptosystem design and mathematics and try to shrug away the fact that it is not proven to be unbreakable. The fact that homomorphic encryption is not proven to be unbreakable is absolutely not wild speculation, it is fact.

> And honestly, is turning off a single option in settings truly impractical?

We all just learned about today! We don't even need to speculate about whether it is impractical, we know it can't be done, and that's before we consider that loss of privacy and agency over devices is a death-by-a-thousand-cuts situation.

> Additionally, the entire purpose of a phone is to send data places. It has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Cellular for a reason. It's a bit absurd to suggest that phones should never send any data anywhere. It's simply a question of what data should and should not be sent.

Clearly I don't think the internet is useless and I don't disable networking on all of my devices because I'm talking to you right now. But the difference is, when I reply to you here, I'm never surprised about what is being sent across the network. I'm typing this message into this box, and when I hit reply, it will send that message over the network to a server.

The difference here is agency. Steve Jobs had a quote about computers being "bicycle[s] for the mind". Well, if you just found out today that your device was sending meta information about your private photos over the network, you would be right to feel like it's not you controlling the bike anymore. The answer to this problem is not throwing a bunch of technical information in your face and telling you its safe.